Cognitive Styles

Cognitive Styles

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Get inside the user's head

We pour over analytics, conduct ethnographic studies, and interview users in order to understand the demographics, goals, and tasks of the people using our product. We create personas, write scenarios, and list use cases. And so we should; understanding who our users are and what they want to achieve is foundational to our job as designers.

But how deep does our understanding of users actually go? Sure, we know their socio-economic bracket, what industry they work in, and the top few tasks they want to achieve on our website. But are there deeper, more innately personal characteristics at work? Can we figure out what really makes them tick?

For over a century, psychologists have been trying to account for the range of individual differences people exhibit when interacting with new information. At the heart of their research lie cognitive styles—the stable attitudes, preferences, and habitual strategies that determine how an individual processes information. Understanding cognitive styles will help us design better experiences for users.

Analytic vs. Holistic Thinkers

Cognitive style ranges between two extremes: analytic thinking and holistic thinking. To figure out which camp you belong to, try this simple exercise:

Take a pen and draw a rectangle at a 45-degree angle on a sheet of paper. Next (and here’s the test), draw a vertical line inside the rectangle.

How did you draw the vertical line? If you aligned it with the edges of the rectangle (for example[illustration1]), there's a good chance you're an analytical thinker characterized by an external frame of reference. If, on the other hand, you drew the line along the north-south axis of the paper rather than the rectangle, then you are more likely to be a holist, inner-directed with independence from your surroundings. Let’s look at each in detail.

Analytic thinkers: brick-by-brick craftsmen

Analytic thinkers, dependent on the structure of their environment, function best when rules and expectations are clearly defined. They are likely to find motivation from external sources and thrive at social interaction. Like a skilled craftsmen, analytic perceivers are highly attuned to the details. When researching a subject, for instance, analytics tend to focus on narrow subtopics, following a logical progression from one to the next. As the name suggests, they are skilled at analyzing the component parts, but they fall short in combining the parts into the whole.

Holistic thinkers: big-picture visionaries

Holists, on the other hand, excel at understanding how the big pieces fit together. They're the visionaries with a bird's-eye view. Intrinsically motivated, holists flourish in flexible environments where they are free to pursue their own interests at their own pace. When approaching a topic they immediately set out to comprehend the big picture, giving holists a more balanced view and helping them put situations into context. But holists sometimes have difficulty grasping the distinction between the different elements.

So what?

Analytics and holists approach tasks very differently. When seeking information online, holists are efficient at finding the right answer in a timely manner and with relatively few clicks. Analytics, however, find it difficult to discern relevant information from the irrelevant. A study by Kyung-Sun Kimfound that analytics spend 50% more time, visit almost twice as many pages, and click 50% more links than their holist counterparts searching for the same information.

This may sound gloomy. However, while the performance gap is drastic between analytics and holists who have a low degree of web expertise, the gap virtually disappears amongst analytics and holists who have a greater amount of web experience.

Designing for Cognitive Styles

What do these differences between analytic and holistic thinkers mean for the design of websites and applications? Above all, they should remind us that users are not uniform; there are vast differences between them, and we must design experiences that meet the needs of both types of thinkers.

Design for learnability

For analytics, a bit of web expertise goes a long way. One goal for effective interfaces should be to help analytic novices improve their proficiency. Put techniques in place that can help users learn how your interface actually works. Make your tools discoverable by discretely calling attention with popovers and offering instruction in blank states.

For first-time visitors, Foodily uses small popovers to introduce users to the most important features unique to their website.

The task manager Flow uses a modal window to present first-time users with an overview of how to use the product.

Forms that show help text when the user focuses on an input (such as this example from Wufoo) provide greater context than leaving the user to guess.

Use strong information scent

The fact that analytics click on 50% more links than holists suggests that analytics have trouble distinguishing relevant information and are easily distracted by tangential links. Increasing the amount of information scent present in the linked text can help users better judge the relevancy of the link before actually clicking on it. Jared Spool found that the optimal length of links is between 7 and 12 words that accurately describe the contents of the linked page.

Try to avoid obscure one- or two-word links such as these found on A List Apart.

Longer, descriptive links have much stronger information scent and are less likely to lead users astray.

Design for wayfinding

Presenting a clear picture of the breadth of your website and where the user is currently positioned in that global context is vital for both holists and analytics alike. Holists need help distinguishing one part from another, while analytics need help understanding how the parts make up the whole. In addition, analytics often use the browser's back button or return to the homepage to start over, suggesting that they're prone to becoming disoriented. Providing signposting that clearly indicates the user's current position in the site can help analytics keep their bearings.

Lonely Planet's breadcrumbs and header make the user's current location within the website clear.

TwigKit's faceted navigation component not only indicates how many results match each filter, but also visualizes the distribution with a series of bars, helping users instantly understand the lay of the land.

Amazon's hierarchical navigation makes clear what sub-categories compose the current section and how the current section fits in with the rest of the site.

In Conclusion

Users are not created equal. There are deep divisions between the way people think, from brick-by-brick analytics to big-picture holists. The experiences we design must play to the strengths of each, while at the same time help them overcome their individual weaknesses. In the words of Edward Tufte, "There are some universal cognitive tasks that are deep and profound—indeed, so deep and profound that it is worthwhile to understand them in order to design our displays in accord with those tasks."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Tyler Tate is a user experience designer focused on making the complex feel simple. He leads UX at TwigKit, organises the Enterprise Search London meetup, is the creator of the 1KB CSS Grid, and has led the design of web applications from CMS to CRM. Tyler lives in London with his wife Ruth and son Galileo. You can keep up with him on Twitter.

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Comments

Yes, I agree with the other commenters that the titles and illustrations are messed up. I'm taking a psychology course in uni and theses are wrong. Analytical thinkers are more accurate in aligning the rod perpendicular to the floor (Check out the Rod and Frame Test).

I am afraid you might have made a mistake. The Illustration 1 should be for holistic drawing, and 2 for analytic. For the illustration 1, people are environment-dependent, and 2, environment-independent.

I'm just amazed that there could be ambiguity about what constitute vertical in this case. What would make more sence is if instead the had started with an upright rectangle, then been asked to rotate the paper, before being asked to draw a vertical line...

Great article. However I am wondering if you got the labels "Analytics" and "Holists" erroneously reversed. All the literature I have read on those catagories (also related to field-dependent/independence) desctibe Analytics as Fielf Independent, focused on details, not affected by their environment while Holists are Fielf-Dependent, able to see the big picture and relationships. That is the oppoosite of how you used the labels. You might check your sources against other sources and see if it's a mistake or if the domain literature itself if switching the terms around.

Thanks everyone for taking the time to both read the article and post your own thoughts.

@Sharon mentioned that lumping people into two categories might be oversimplifying. Indeed, other factors such as personality type and learning style also play a key role, while cognitive style itself boasts over a dozen discrete frameworks (Kozhevnikov 2007 has a good summary: http://nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/mkozhevnlab/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/cognitive_styles2007.pdf). However, there does seem to be a general consensus around the two polarities presented in this article.

@Alia is right that much of this material is taken from research on field-dependence vs. field-independence. Many researchers have come to the conclusion that the holist vs. serialist dimension (originally developed by Pask in the UK) and the field-dependence vs. field-independence (developed by Witken in the US) are actually one in the same (see Riding 2001: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1080/0144341910110301). I opted to use the holistic and analytic labels simply because they're more approachable.

@Tom suggests that, in reality, people must surely be a bit of both. I think he's certainly right. Not only do many people fall in between the two extremes, but psychologists have identified a "meta-style" factor as well (see Kozhevnikov 2007 again), which measures how swiftly people can switch from a holistic to an analytic perspective as the situation demands. Most of us, however, do tend to favor one over the other.

@Stomme is a bit skeptical of the drawing test. He's right: a single exercise should be taken with a grain of salt. While this rod-and-frame test was one of the very first tools psychologists used to identify cognitive style, modern assessments are much more sophisticated.

Is it not possible that most people in fact possess and use the qualities of both "Analytical" and "holistic" approaches, much in the same way that people use visual, audial and kinetic learning styles in their own unique way.

Rather than putting us in one of two camps I think it's more useful to realise that users more than likely possess different quantities of both these approaches.

Very good article, long overdue in UX circles. I'm so glad you posted this :)

Cognitive styles really do matter. It's important to realize that users are not homogenous in the way they perceive and tackle problems. It's not just ability, but the preferred way of using ability. How a person is wired makes a huge difference.

An excellent source about cognitive styles is the book "Thinking Styles", by psychologist Robert Sternberg. Dr. Sternberg advances his own model in addition to summarizing other popular models: http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Styles-ebook/dp/B000SESVAO

Beyond cognitive styles, it's also important to note that people react to experiences with emotions before they do so cognitively. The more ancient part of the brain, the limbic system, drives decision making and is a powerful influencer in the way we react to pretty much everything. Facial coding is a good way to get a sense of a user's emotions as they perform usability tests.

This is an interesting version of the field-dependence test, however what you label 'holistic' is actually field-independent, a cognitive style that is actually more analytical than the field-dependent style that you call 'analytical' here. Field dependent people tend to take things more on face value. Despite the names, the UX considerations you make seem valid for the different field-dependent/ independent cognitive styles- good article!

And what if, like me, your response to the first question is to say "how will you use it? and what do you think it should be vertical to?" See if answer B is a good match for answer A and then either do it as asked or ignore the B response and be prepared to answer why. Where do we fall on the analytic/holistic scale?